Posted on 09/01/2005 4:30:06 PM PDT by FormerACLUmember
It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as if they were swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who invented air-conditioning as they watched TV "storm teams" warn of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurricanes in August are as much a part of life in this town as hangovers on Ash Wednesday.
But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however—the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.
The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.
Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.
When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great.
"The killer for Louisiana is a Category Three storm at 72 hours before landfall that becomes a Category Four at 48 hours and a Category Five at 24 hours—coming from the worst direction," says Joe Suhayda, a retired coastal engineer at Louisiana State University who has spent 30 years studying the coast. Suhayda is sitting in a lakefront restaurant on an actual August afternoon sipping lemonade and talking about the chinks in the city's hurricane armor. "I don't think people realize how precarious we are," Suhayda says, watching sailboats glide by. "Our technology is great when it works. But when it fails, it's going to make things much worse."
The chances of such a storm hitting New Orleans in any given year are slight, but the danger is growing. Climatologists predict that powerful storms may occur more frequently this century, while rising sea level from global warming is putting low-lying coasts at greater risk. "It's not if it will happen," says University of New Orleans geologist Shea Penland. "It's when."
Since we can't post articles from USA Today, check out the article at the following website. Last sentence of the article: "Residents will have to deal with a threat of flooding for at least the next 10-15 years." (this was said in July, 2000)
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/news/2000/wnoflood.htm
08/28/2005 - Updated 03:44 PM ET
'Big Easy' a bowl of trouble in hurricanes
By James West and Chris Vaccaro, USATODAY.com
(This story was published in July 2000)
Remember this prediction.
Sometime in the next 25 years an earthquake of at least 7.0 will cause mass chaos, many deaths, and billions of dollars in damage in the city of Los Angeles.
And I predict snow at the North Pole this winter. My track record is 100% on that one...;^)
I can see it now. It will be the fault of ....W.... yep again!
Right...but was is amazing is how predictable this disaster was...and how inept the local and state government has been in the critical hours after the storm had hit.
But, of couse, the local politicians are blaming Bush for not giving the LA SLG cash for them to embezzel.
Thank you. Yes his prediction was for a category five. It does seem that at least some of his prediction was predicated on the failure of the levy system. This being the case, one might still consider his original prediction to not have been that wild even for a category three that missed by a ways.
We are three days post event, and it seems the official death toll has all but been abandoned. Seems a little strange to me.
while rising sea level from global warming is putting low-lying coasts at greater risk.
I know what you mean about the death toll. While watching various hurricane 'specials' on MSM last evening I kept a count. I derived the number from the stories of who died from family members and came up with about 75 or so.
Or San Francisco/Berkeley/Oakland/San Jose, Seattle, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, somewhere in the vicinity of the NMSZ, or Charleston, SC.
I used to think that also, until L.A. had a series of three or four earthquakes in about eight years, that registered quite close to 7.0.
Codes for building and retrofitting have significantly reduced the damages and fatalities from those quakes.
Look, your premise may still hold true for that 9.0 that may come along at any minute.
In the midwest you have tornados, hurricanes, flooding... The midwest is also suseptable to the New Madrid fault that is capable of breaking loose a duzzie. The last swarm that struck near the bootheel of Missouri rang chuch bells in Boston.
Compared to that, I live 25 miles from Northridge. We had no damage from that whatsoever. As I recall, it was close to 7.0.
I got a question:
New Orleans was infamous for bussing neer do wells from poll to poll on election. The question I have is why didn't these boneheads use this system to get people the )&*^&*( out of there!!!!! And where the _)(&*() were those buses on Monday and Tuesday????
Oh I forgot.. No money or profit from this proactive decision
Never mind
I live in Indiana near Gary and I got water MREs plenty of shells for a browning 12 ga. and full choke 20 ga. (I got poor aim), a Bible and a lot of other things to make it through if the unthinkable happens ...
Umm...nothing remotely like what you've stated above has happened.
There have been a number of powerful quakes, way the heck out in the desert.
You're beginning to put yourself PRECISELY in the mindset of residents of New Orleans and Mississippi as of August 28, 2005.
Comparing Northridge to what is possible in LA is like comparing Hurricane Georges to Hurricane Katrina. Don't kid yourself.
I wanted to more narrowly address the actual strength of the earthquakes I mentioned earlier.
The Northridge California quake was pegged at 6.7.
The Landers California quake was pegged at 7.3.
The Whittier Narrows quake was pegged at 5.9.
The Landers quake was located east of L.A. in the desert. The strongest of the three, there wasn't a lot of damage attributed to it, but some.
The Northride quake did cause quite a bit of damage, but it wasn't all that bad considering that it did hit in a rather populated area.
The Whittier quake didn't cause as much damage as one might suspect either.
Bolting down homes to the foundation, cross bracing the support beems and making sure interior furniture has been ankored to walls has really cut down on injuries and damage.
Bilding codes for commercial properties have been strengthened as well. This has all helped.
He got the month right, the water depth right...all the little details...it is scary, although even if he's wrong I do think the death toll will be 4000 or so at least...although I hope even I'm wrong!
And it's not my premise that a 9.0 may come along "any minute" anywhere in California; it's physically impossible to have above an 8.5 in California, or anywhere else in the US, other than Alaska and offshore Oregon and Washington.
And also you've run out the tired old tornado stuff that people in denial about their personal threat from quakes and hurricanes usually do; the chance of any given point, even in Oklahoma, being hit by a tornado in a given year is vanishingly small, and trivial compared to the chance in a given year of a point in Los Angeles suffering severe quake shaking or a point on the gulf or SE coast being hit by a hurricane. While there are a lot of them, tornadoes have very narrow paths; it just SEEMS like the whole midwest is covered in tornadoes (though it wasn't this year as a record was set for fewest tornadoes.) The disaster risk in the US is not equal across the country, as much as people in California or who live on the water on the east coast would like to pretend.
Northridge had a great deal of its energy directed into fairly unpopulated mountains.
And you have to remember that Northridge was about 30 times more powerful than the Whittier quake.
And Landers was really quite a long way from populated areas.
Also there was extreme luck regarding the timing of Northridge....
Death toll would have been a completely different story if it hadn't been in the very early hours of the morning.
If you'd like to spend your time doing so, why not look up how many people are killed each year by earthquakes, and how many are killed by lightening and tornadoes in the United States.
Deaths due to earthquakes will be the smaller figure.
The next time the New Madrid fault breaks loose, you'll see ten to one hundred times the deaths Los Angeles basin quakes have caused this century. There will be damage from New Orleans to Washington, D.C. There is no earthquake building code component in that region.
Thanks for the comments.
Not really - the city sits below sea level in a hurricane prone area with a dike and levee system rated for a category-3 hurricane. It got hit with a 4-5 with predictable results. What's odd is that the levee failure was a little slower than predicted.
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